Acceptance - Stefan’s Week-notes 07/12/2025
Inspired by the weeknotes of friends and coachees including John Fitzgerald, Steve Messer and Nour Sidawi - I thought I'd give it a go.
Weeknotes - Acceptance
This week has been about Acceptance - the part of transformation which requests that you sit with who you are how far you have already travelled.
Acceptance dictates, not just how well something is perceived but is received by the self.
There aren’t many full stops in change and transformation. But we can pause and see how much we have accomplished and that is often enough.
Here are my reflections on this week:
1. What activities did I get up to this week?
This week began with a wonderful moment of serendipity - meeting the fabulous Sharon Green, who recognised me from the ‘good old days’ of Twitter and reached out to say hello. She’s brilliant, generous, and has built a great community - the HR Interim network; well worth checking out.
I held several wellbeing in a hybrid working environment coaching sessions for Public Digital, building on the executive coaching I’ve done this year with their leadership team.
There were one-to-one coaching sessions too: a commercial lead in a consultancy exploring career progression, and a transformation director in the civil service leaning into resilience while becoming bolder in the conversations that matter.
I ran mentor sessions as part of the Digital Boost programme I work on for and with my great friend Angela Mclleland - supporting an education lead and a self-employed business partner to find clarity, direction, and confidence.
Around all that, there was the usual blend of life and work admin, a bit of Christmas shopping, and preparing for a meeting in London next week to discuss Public Digital’s people strategy.
2. What’s the central theme or thread that tied my week together?
Acceptance - of what can be done, what should be done, and when enough is enough.
So many of us place ourselves under invisible pressure to be more, do more, deliver more. This week reminded me of the importance of contracting the expectation: agreeing what good looks like, naming viable timescales, and recognising when you’ve genuinely done enough for the day.
A lot of people aren’t racing towards actual deadlines.
They’re racing towards the ones they’ve invented in their heads.
This week was about challenging that gently, clearly, and with compassion.
3. What moments lit me up this week?
A coaching session with a transformation director absolutely lit me up. At the end she said she was glad she’d met me this year and begun our work together - direct, genuine, and unforced.
She’s achieved a huge amount - arguably over-achieved - and it’s come with personal cost. Our work has been about taking stock, understanding the strain, rebalancing, and redistributing the load.
Hearing her name the value of that work so clearly reminded me why I do what I do.
4. What did I wrestle with this week?
I wrestled with my internal dialogue about not doing enough with Be The Waves since announcing the organisation. That quiet pressure that whispers, “You should be further along.”
But then I paused and actually looked at what’s happened.
How many people have spoken to me about stewardship - the mission at the heart of Be The Waves.
How four Be The Waves coaches have already come forward.
How the first wellbeing and time-management coaching work is secured.
How the Intent and Impact session I authored was delivered beautifully at the Public Digital Winter Gathering by Charmaine Kwame one of our Be The Waves Coaches.
And how I’ll be convening the coaches in January.
Not a bad start at all.
So the message back to myself this week was simple:
Take some of your own medicine, Stefan - remember how far you’ve come, not just how far you’ve yet to go.
5. What personal moments felt significant this week?
The Winter Gathering felt significant - not just the content, but seeing it delivered under the fully branded and bannered identity of Be The Waves. It made the whole thing feel real in a new way.
There was also a deeply meaningful conversation with a dear friend - grounding, clarifying, and human.
And then a message from my best mate Jason. He told me he’d been asked to support athletes around RED-S and immune-system issues, and he wrote:
“This was inspired by you, buddy - and also your chat with Liam. It got me thinking about how I can turn my setback into a positive and help other people.”
Moments like that remind me the ripple effect is real.
6. Where did I see stewardship in practice this week?
I saw stewardship in the conversations with Public Digital about 2026 onwards and their people strategy - a willingness to ask, “What do our people need to thrive, not just deliver?”
And I saw it in the transformation director I coached - someone who has long driven what’s good for the organisation, and who is now learning to steward themselves too.
Real stewardship is always twofold: the system and the self. Both showed up this week.
7. What metaphor or image captures the feeling of this week?
A full tea cup, a bottle of water, and a sea view - captured during a much-needed pause earlier in the week.
Enough.
A reminder that the smallest reset can often be the most restorative.
8. What did I notice beneath the surface this week?
A shift - a genuine one. More leaders are talking about stewardship, not as sentiment but as necessity in a world moving faster than structures can adapt.
Kerri O’Neil’s Linkedin post, highlighting talk at the OEB Global Conference captured this beautifully. Speaking on “What Was I Made For?”, she explored the revolution in learning required for the co-intelligence age, drawing on Barbie, Jung, Ipsos’ leadership journey, and the cultural glue needed for the future where human and artificial intelligence sit side by side.
It felt like stewardship on the main stage:
long-term thinking,
cultural alignment,
preparing people for what’s coming,
not reacting once it arrives.
The deeper question beneath it all: What are we here to become?
Something is shifting. And the question I love posing, as a coach, is “how do we become it?” and with the leaders I work with; “how do you become it?”.
9. What am I carrying forward into next week?
A joy and vigour for what could be rather than what isn’t.
Because there’s real goodness in orienting towards possibility instead of deficit. Combine that with recognising how far you’ve already come - and that you are, and have been, enough - and you’ve got a recipe for sustainable momentum.
A shift from scarcity to sufficiency, and from sufficiency to potential.
10. What writing flowed from me this week?
A series of LinkedIn posts on identity and becoming.
But the piece that truly flowed was the long reflection and blog, I wrote this week, on “How can I help you?” - a distillation of twenty-four years of coaching, consulting, leading, creating, and navigating change.
A piece that said:
I can help you make better decisions.
I can help you find courage.
I can help you act, not just intend.
I can help you lead without losing yourself.
And I can help teams and organisations transform in ways that work, last, and matter.
At its heart:
I can help you do all of this while staying you.
Writing it felt like a release - and unexpectedly, a reclaiming.
11. How do I want to sign off this week?
By acknowledging that 2025 has been quite the year.
A year of broken hearts.
A year of losing Dad.
A year that stretched me, reshaped me, and revealed more of me than I expected.
Yet it feels like it may be ending on a grounded high - the kind that comes from alignment, not adrenaline.
A high that suggests next year can be a deeper part of my legacy for my children, and a fuller walk into the work of helping create a thriving planet.
One step, one act of stewardship at a time.
12. What thought or question do I want to leave myself (and others) with?
Who are you already?
If you changed the story you tell yourself about who you are - what might become possible next year?
Possibility is where it all begins.
I’m Stefan.
Who are you? And are you being that person often enough.
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For now; thank you
I am…
An executive coach and the CEO of Be The Waves, growing stewardship for a thriving planet.
I helping good people lead great things; in other words - I empower Stewardship
Good people care about others, our planet and beauty. Great things are changes for the betterment of society and all that lives within an around it. It sounds big and fun - it is.
I'm also an endurance racing cyclist and a go getter.
You can read more about me and what I do; how I work here